The Avenger

You know her as the lawyer who represented Tiger Woods' mistresses and the blond allegedly groped by presidential hopeful Herman Cain. But Gloria Allred has also done pioneering work for women's rights. Is it possible to be a righteous feminist advocate and a celebrity gun for hire?

One Monday morning in February, several cameramen were setting up their equipment in the conference room of Gloria Allred's law office, just outside Beverly Hills. Black-and-white photographs on the walls included portraits of Cesar Chavez and Amelia Earhart, along with a panorama of a suffragist rally. We were waiting for Allred to appear with her clients, two women who'd been sued by an ex-boyfriend they had in common, a lawyer named Matthew Couloute Jr. He claimed that they'd damaged his business with anonymous posts on a website for betrayed lovers called Liarscheatersrus.com.

When Allred arrived, she sat with her clients Stacey Blitsch and Amanda Ryncarz in front of a spray of microphones. With her feathered chestnut hair, smooth skin, and a wide smile that reveals a row of straight, white teeth, Allred looks a good two decades younger than her 71 years. This morning, she was wearing a cream-colored St. John jacket and an animal-print turtleneck. She'd gathered the press to announce a victory: Couloute's case had been dismissed by the court on the grounds that he hadn't shown either woman to have intentionally harmed his business relationships. As for the comments themselves ("[He] lied and cheated his entire way through 40 years of life" and "He's great at lying and covering it up without batting an eye"), the judge decided they couldn't be defamatory, because they were statements not of fact but of opinion. "The average reader," the judge wrote, "would know that the comments are 'emotionally charged rhetoric' and 'the opinions of disappointed lovers.'" I gleaned these details from his decision, which had been helpfully appended to the press packet each of us received. During the conference, however, Allred kept emphasizing what the ruling implied for women's rights: "We believe that women should not be silenced and be afraid to speak out and express their opinion on the Internet about those men that they believe have lied to them or cheated on them," she declared, reading from a statement. "Women helping women by warning them may be the only means by which women can protect themselves."

All this business about female empowerment had little to do with the judge's actual decision, which made no mention of gender and hewed closely to the insufficiencies of Couloute's case. The reporters in the room seized on this discrepancy, but Allred remained resolutely on message. "I just would refer you to the opinion," she said when asked whether she believed it would allow a man to call a woman, say, a gold digger on a website. She may have kicked off the event by making sweeping statements about women's rights, but now she was sticking to the letter of the ruling. "Don't lie and cheat, and then you won't find yourself on the Internet," she concluded, pounding the table for emphasis.

The press conference ended barely 15 minutes after it began, with Allred hugging both her clients, which elicited a couple of "awww"s from the cameramen. After Allred and the two women left, the room erupted in incredulous laughter. Then the reporters and cameramen started talking in earnest about getting the story of the perilous world of Liarscheatersrus.com on the air.

In the past few years, Allred has been retained by Sharon Bialek, the first woman to publicly accuse Herman Cain of "sexually inappropriate" behavior; two mistresses of Tiger Woods; and a for- mer adult-film star who received sexts from then congressman Anthony Weiner. She's been parodied on The Simpsons ("shrill feminist attorney Gloria Allred") and Saturday Night Live ("The following program is presented by attorney Gloria Allred and is intended solely for self-promotion"). She has her own pseudo-reality courtroom TV show, We the People With Gloria Allred. She's appeared on Dr. Phil, the Today show, and almost every CNN talk show you can name. Her visibility has made her both prized and disdained by the media, whose attention she so visibly courts, which has cast her as everyone from a latter-day Joan of Arc to a "Tabloid Feminist." When I asked Allred what she makes of the media's derision, she was dismissive: "I don't really care how I'm perceived. Frankly, Scarlett, I don't give a damn. I just want justice for women. I have to be a strong advocate, and all I care about is winning for my clients."

Allred was admitted to the California bar in 1975, which happened to be the year that Time, in its Person of the Year issue, dedicated to American Women. She started a law practice with two classmates from Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, Michael Maroko and Nathan Goldberg, and they began to establish themselves as specialists in civil rights, including the burgeoning fields of gender discrimination and sexual harassment. In 1980, she successfully sued the L.A. County Sheriff's Department, which had been shackling pregnant inmates while they were in labor. In 1984, Allred filed a case against L.A.'s Catholic Archdiocese on behalf of a woman who was abused by seven priests and had given birth to one of their offspring; 23 years later, she won. Another client had been asked during a job interview about her menstrual cycle; Allred won a settlement after eight years of wrangling.

Her critics point to these early victories and draw a sharp contrast with her later work, wondering why the same attorney would deign to take on plights that seem more like fodder for gossip mags than grave affronts to justice. But Allred doesn't see the discrepancy in such stark terms—if she sees it at all. In her 2007 book, Fight Back and Win, she has a chapter called "Little Things Start Big Changes" in which she describes bringing suit against everyone from a dry cleaner (for charging more to clean women's blouses) to a kids' salon (for charging more for girls' haircuts). The sheer range of cases is striking. And to each one—whether the client was a victim of rape or a reality-TV experience gone awry—Allred appends an "Empowerment Lesson." (Sample: "Standing up for integrity has its price, but it's one worth paying.") Allred seems to have taken "the personal is political" rallying cry of the '70s and run with it, finding both victimization and empowerment wherever she looks.

Indeed, Allred still uses the radical vocabulary of an earlier era. "I'm not an academic. I'm not a philosopher," she told me the first time we met. "I'm in the war zone, I'm on the battlefield. Often, there's going to be blood in the water." She concedes that women are "learning their rights, and they're fighting back," but she doesn't believe things have improved much for women in the four decades since she started practicing law. If anything, she said, young women are prone to greater disappointment, "because they expect to be treated fairly, to be treated on their merits, not sexually harassed, not beaten, not deprived of their child support. 'It's 2012? I didn't think it was going to happen to me.' They're in shock." When pressed about whether she truly believes the situation is as dire as it's ever been, Allred is unrelenting. "It hasn't gotten better in 36 years," she told me, her brown eyes trained steadily on mine. "There are still wounded on the battlefield, and most of them are called women."

"To woman power!" Stacey Blitsch exclaimed, holding up her glass of mineral water, and the rest of us did the same. The news conference had ended, and I was sitting with Allred and her two clients in a booth at Spago, in Beverly Hills. Allred told the maiÃÇtre d' that we were celebrating a big victory, and he proceeded to send out several dishes on the house, including a deconstructed apple strudel with CONGRATULATIONS written on its plate in chocolate cursive script.

Ryncarz and Blitsch, the latter a former roller-derby star who appeared on the cable show Roller Jam, had known each other before Couloute named them in his suit, but they came to Allred through separate channels. "My sister works at Spike TV," Blitsch started to say, "and when she heard about Matthew's lawsuit, she—"

"I don't think you want to go into who said what to whom," interrupted Allred.

Ryncarz credited her brother for the suggestion. "He said 'Wouldn't it be great if you could get Gloria Allred?'"

I asked the two how it was to work with her. "Awesome, awesome," Blitsch said. "She doesn't have a PR person, no publicist She's so independent, she gets it done. It's amazing."

When we left the shaded cover of Spago for the glare of the midday sun, a cameraman was waiting outside.

"Amanda!" he called out. "Do you think that after this guys will wanna date you?"

Allred was smiling as she moved to stand between her two clients. "I am with the winners and champions, and any man would be fortunate to date them!" The three women assumed the pose of Olympic medalists, holding one another's hands up in the air.

"We taught a lesson today," Allred said after the two of us had returned to her office. We were sitting on a settee that had reliefs of women's faces carved into the wood. That lesson, she said, was "about being able to help others and how women are treated by men. These things don't get discussed too often, except in soap operas. But this is real life."

The cynical take on Allred would be to assume this kind of moralizing is, well, cynical: She squeezes a case for significance because significance is how you get attention, and attention means celebrity, and celebrity means money. This critique would at least give Allred some credit for being shrewd—which she undoubtedly is. At the same time, to call it entirely cynical would be to imply that she saw some irony in the situation, that she secretly believed the import of such a case was not as urgent as she insisted. And irony isn't something that interests Allred as much as it interests the journalists who write about her. She is animated by clarity, not ambiguity. "What you see is what you get with Gloria," Maroko said. "She doesn't say something that she doesn't believe in. That, I can tell you." In his estimation, she has remained remarkably consistent in the three dozen years that they've worked together. "I think she always felt more attached to the underdogs and taking up their cause, and she's that way now," he said. Even in her high-profile cases, even when her client might have a considerable amount of money or fame, "the party on the other side is generally powerful. She really feels for who she perceives to be the victim."

In 2004, she filed a lawsuit on behalf of Robin Tyler and Diane Olson, challenging the ban on same-sex marriage as unconstitutional. Four years later, they became one of the first gay couples to marry in California. "I started to cry, because nobody else was going to bat for us," Tyler said, recalling when Allred agreed to take her case. Tyler has known Allred since the 1970s, an era when second-wave feminists such as Betty Friedan were trying to steer the women's movement away from lesbian advocacy. "She never had any hang-up about the gay issue," said Tyler. "I don't know where she got that consciousness."

Allred's parents weren't politically active, though she doesn't recall them ever succumbing to the biases endemic to the time of her childhood—the '40s and '50s. "There was a lot of racism, believe me," Allred said, "but never out of the mouths of my parents." Her father, Morris Bloom, was a door-to-door salesman in Philadelphia. "All he did was work. All. The. Time." Her mother, Stella, was a full-time homemaker. Stella had moved to the United States from England with only an eighth-grade education, "though she was always reading, always challenging ideas."

Allred got a scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania, where she met Peyton Bray. "He was extremely bright. Handsome, I think, by anybody's measure. And came from a very good family." They married her sophomore year, and their only child, Lisa, was born when Allred was 19. Bray suffered from bipolar disorder, and soon she was making plans to leave him. "He would throw things," she recalled. "I never regretted leaving, that was the best choice I could have made." Bray committed suicide in 2003.

A young single mother, Allred moved back in with her parents after graduation and became one of the first female teachers at Benjamin Franklin High School in Philly's inner city. In 1966, she decided to move with another single mother to California and share a household. "I didn't see my life as going anywhere in Philadelphia, and I was tired of the weather," she said. "I thought of California as the land of opportunity." During that first year of living in Los Angeles, she met William Allred, who became her second husband. An aircraft accessories entrepreneur, he was convicted of conspiracy to defraud the government in 1987, and they divorced shortly thereafter. (About their marriage, she will say only that it ended "because I filed and asked for a divorce.") She was a member of the Los Angeles Teachers Association, and in 1971 she enrolled in law school to learn more about collective bargaining.

Years before, while studying for her teaching degree at New York University, Allred had been talking in class about African Americans and civil rights when, she recalled, the professor asked, "'What about your rights as women?' I'd never heard anyone talk about women's rights, or the fact that we didn't have any." Still, she said, it took the cumulative effect of life experiences "such as not being able to collect child support, such as being discriminated against on my job, such as being raped, such as having an abortion when it was illegal" to understand her teacher's question. In 1966, while traveling in Acapulco, Allred had met a local physician who took her to dinner and then raped her at gunpoint. She discovered she was pregnant once she returned to the States; after her abortion, she started to hemorrhage, an ordeal she recounts in Fight Back and Win. She was admitted to the hospital with a 106-degree fever. She remembers a nurse telling her, "This will teach you a lesson."

Allred describes in her book how her experience as both a rape victim and, later, as a lawyer for them made her realize that women keep silent for fear that they won't be believed. She herself waited nearly two decades before speaking publicly about what happened to her. Kendall Coffey, a Florida lawyer and the author of Spinning the Law: Trying Cases in the Court of Public Opinion, credits Allred with shifting the public's focus to the injured party's perspective, which "was far less common before her work. Her career made that part of the landscape." And the attention she draws to herself in the process could be construed as part of the point: Rather than engage directly with distraught victims or their family members, Coffey says, the media is now expected to go through an advocate.

Which perhaps explains why Allred persists in casting her news conferences as empowerment sessions rather than the publicity stunts her critics allege. But the politics of speaking out are not what they were in the 1970s, before public suffering became a staple of talk shows and 24-hour news. Not to mention that some of Allred's clients have been victims in imbroglios that involved neither violence nor a criminal act. Was it empowering for the adult-film star Joslyn James to tell the world how "deeply hurt" she was by Tiger Woods' lies, including his promises that "she was the only one, other than his wife"? And what about Elin Nordegren, Woods' wife at the time? Already subject to her husband's infidelity, was she victimized by James' public announcement in 2010 or by the golf-themed pornographic film in which James eventually starred? (Called The 11th Hole, it depicts sexual reenactments of Woods' alleged text messages to James.) When the crime is one of feelings hurt—however intensely—can the offended party hold a news conference about being at the mercy of a duplicitous lover without stripping the word victim of its power and inadvertently stoking what the feminist scholar Alyson Cole has called "the cult of true victimhood," in which we make invidious distinctions between "real" and "bogus" victims? These are precisely the kinds of musings that make Allred impatient. "I have a case. Here are the issues in my case. This is what this case is about. Seek the result."

In March, Allred sent a letter to Florida prosecutors, urging them to investigate Rush Limbaugh for calling Sandra Fluke a "slut" and a "prostitute" after the Georgetown Law School student argued for mandatory contraception coverage in front of Democratic members of Congress. The statute Allred cited was a law from 1883 that makes it a crime to impute a woman's "want of chastity." Allred's missive was printed on letterhead that included a quote from the Equal Rights Amendment; had the ERA been ratified, the archaic law probably would have been thrown out. When I pointed out how the statute smacked of paternalism, Allred was ready. "That's your characterization," she said calmly. "I don't choose to characterize it. I choose to state what it is. It seems to squarely fit the facts. I'm not here to write a law-school review of whether that should be on the books, should not be on the books. I'm here to say there is a law in Florida that does seem to apply to Mr. Limbaugh, who resides in Florida, who broadcasts his show—from Florida—which is heard by millions of listeners. Now, the only question is, does [the state attorney] wish to prosecute or not?" Hers was a steady shot, but it was as if she'd trained her sights on the circus clown while the elephant ran loose. Limbaugh's boorishness had already succeeded in distracting the public from Fluke's message about women's access to affordable health care; Allred was engaging in Limbaugh's sideshow instead of the real issue.

At her office, Allred showed me her inscribed copy of Shoulder to Shoulder, Midge Mackenzie's history of the British suffragist movement. "Women who want to vote, arrested. By people in uniforms," Allred said, pointing to a photo. She gestured to a vintage British bobby uniform displayed on a dressmaker's form beside her settee, tarnished handcuffs and all.

As she flipped through the pages, I asked her about the moment in the news conference when she'd insisted that women were the ultimate beneficiaries of the judge's decision. "My view is that women are hurt more than men," she said. "That men, because they have more access to power and wealth, are more likely to use it to hurt women." Both might lie to each other, but "I think it's definitely more devastating to women, emotionally and financially. Women are socialized from birth to believe in men, to believe men will protect them." If she saw any dissonance between the deprivation that had motivated the suffragettes and the situation that faced Blitsch and Ryncarz, Allred wasn't showing it. "I'm never satisfied with the status and condition of women. Why would I be?"

She stopped at a page that read HUNGER-STRIKE. In 2010, Allred went on a 30-day fast of her own in support of the never-ratified Equal Rights Amendment, skipping 90 meals, for the 90 years that American women had the right to vote. "Look at this," she said to me, pointing to a photograph of a woman attended by a figure holding a long tube to her face. "They were forcibly fed through their nose. This is true courage. Beyond anything that we see today. I mean, really. Forcible feeding. Through the nose."

The next morning, I met Allred at the Metropolitan Courthouse, where she was waiting for the arraignment of Mark Berndt, a former elementary school teacher who'd been charged with 23 counts of lewd acts on minors. He'd allegedly tied up several of his students and fed them his semen on a spoon. Allred, retained by the family of one of the alleged victims, sat for more than an hour in the windowless courtroom before Berndt was brought out. He pleaded not guilty. The arraignment took fewer than 15 minutes. As we waited for the elevator back to the ground floor,a gray-haired reporter approached Allred. "Don't see you in traffic court much," he said. He wanted to know whether she was going to bring a civil suit, and Allred did what she does whenever she doesn't want to reveal something to the press. She smiled and said nothing. Convincing Allred that I would be interested in learning about her less visible work took some cajoling. She told me that when she makes a case of hers available to the media, "there's always a reason." I wondered whether what she thought the press wanted—bad boys, pretty girls, lurid scandals—happened to be the same as what she thought it deserved. Allred's career has tracked with the proliferation of celebrity culture. Had she simply adapted to what that culture was telling her? And was she perpetuating its basest appetites in the process?

Lisa Bloom, Allred's daughter, is a lawyer and legal analyst who appears frequently on TV. She's also the author of Think, in which she offers a thoughtful critique of our tabloid world while questioning her own role in it. When I asked her about Allred, she defended her. "My mother does a lot of really important cases," Bloom said, mentioning a lawsuit on behalf of farmworkers and another involving a victim of gang rape. Those matters received "very little media attention. But if she had a case involving Tiger Woods, not only is it blown up in the media 24-7, but even years later, people are still talking about it. So, is my mother at fault? Or is the media at fault?" A creative lawyer could make the argument for either side.

"Hey there!" A heavyset woman stood on the sidewalk, grinning and waving as we paused on the courthouse steps. Her face was largely covered by wraparound sunglasses, and she was wearing a hoodie and knit hat despite 75-degree weather. She looked happy to see us.

"Do you know her?" I asked Allred. "No." The woman continued talking, shifting to the third person. "Does she take anything on contingency? I have a strong case," she said. Allred pulled one of her bifold business cards out of her purse, handing it over. She told me that people approach her like this all the time.

I recalled something she said when we first met. "Let me ask you this: Who would you suggest they call? If they said, 'We have a women's rights case. And if Gloria Allred can't do it, who would you suggest?'" Incessant exposure has made Allred recognizable in a way that other effective attorneys aren't. Getting on television functions as an informal advertising campaign, to be sure, one that has clearly brought her all kinds of social and financial benefits. And perhaps a not-insignificant number of people who approach her are looking for a windfall. But the publicity makes her accessible, and I suspect the presence of Gloria Allred at the negotiating table exerts a different order of pressure than that of an anonymous ambulance chaser with a full-page ad in the yellow pages.

Allred returned to the courtroom steps and was quiet for a moment. She was about to walk over to the DA's office; later in the afternoon, she'd comment on the musical collaboration between Rihanna and her abusive ex-boyfriend, Chris Brown, on CNN. A man carrying a large camera approached us and started taking pictures. He hadn't said anything, and she didn't seem to notice. The shutter on his camera continued clicking as I scribbled in my notebook. Allred was looking out toward the street, paying no attention to either one of us.